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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You can use Fetch for any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. On November 28, 2019, 19-year-old Zach Brettler was living at home with his parents in London. He told his mother, Rochelle, he was going to spend the weekend with a friend.
Just to chill out, he told her he was a little stressed out and he was going to do a phone detox.
He told her he was going to be staying in a part of London just a few miles away, in a fancy apartment complex called Riverwalk.
And so, as far as Rochelle knew, that was where he would be.
journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. Zach's friend came to pick him up. And after he left, Rochelle realized Zach had left his keys and credit cards behind. His mother thought that was really odd.
And so she just texted him and she said, you know, I'm so worried about you. Are you okay? If you've gone away for the weekend, you know, aren't you going to need your keys and your wallet? Is everything going to be all right? And hours later, he texted back,
And he just wrote, all good, X. The next morning, Rochelle was at home alone. Her husband, Matthew, was on a business trip. Around 9.30 a.m., she heard the doorbell ring.
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Chapter 2: What happened to Zac Brettler in November 2019?
He was always a bit of a smart aleck. He was a great talker. He was the kid who would put on funny voices. He had a kind of theatricality to him. He would tell jokes. He was always very at ease talking to adults, even when he was a kid. And so he was kind of fun to be around in that respect. You know, he had a sort of slightly jazzy style of conversation.
You know, sometimes you encounter somebody and they're just kind of fun to talk to because you never know quite what they're going to come out with next. And he had a confidence to him, even as a really young kid.
His older brother Joe remembers that once at a family party, when Zach was around five, a girl showed something to Zach and asked him, "'Can you read this?' Zach told her, "'I didn't bring my glasses.'" He used to memorize the electronic sections from shopping catalogs and loved cars, especially fancy sports cars. His favorite was a Bugatti. Zach started going to a school called Mill Hill.
He became known as a class clown, and he did well. He joined the tennis team and the cricket team. His parents noticed he started to become obsessed with money. Many of his classmates came from very wealthy families.
really wealthy families. And so a lot of Zak's classmates were the children of oligarchs, the children of foreigners, often from the former Soviet Union, who had huge fortunes, billionaires, who had a second home in London. They made London their home, in part because they wanted to send their kids to school in London.
Zak had never really been exposed to those kinds of people when he was growing up, but at 13, He gets to Mill Hill and he's suddenly surrounded by these classmates, these kind of international students who had swagger and they had money and they had designer clothes. And on the weekends they would go to fancy restaurants and they'd party at nice hotels. A lot of the kids were boarding students.
And the dormitory was about an eight minute walk from class. And on cold days, these kids of oligarchs, they would summon Ubers to bring them to class.
Zach started saying how great he thought Vladimir Putin was. His favorite movies were The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio and War Dogs, about childhood friends who get rich by becoming arms dealers. As a teenager, Zach began fighting with his parents. They argued a lot about money.
Rochelle and Matthew were really well off by most standards. They lived in a nice 2,000-square-foot apartment in Maida Vale, which is quite a nice neighborhood in central London. And they were paying to send these two kids to private school. So this was a family that, by most standards, was really privileged. But Zach felt as though he didn't have enough.
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Chapter 3: How did Zac's parents react to his disappearance?
And it only lasted a second. And he didn't actually, you know, physically choke her. But it was that kind of impulse to sort of literally to kind of go for the jugular impulse. And she was terrified. And it was over almost as quickly as it began, but on the other side of that, Rochelle insisted that Zach get into therapy.
Zach went to see a psychiatrist who noted that Zach had a somewhat defiant manner. They talked about school and his family. Zach said he was, quote, focused on being wealthy. The psychiatrist said Zach showed, quote, a potentially dangerous lack of insight and skewed norms of behavior. The psychiatrist recommended therapy, but Zach only went to one appointment.
And Rochelle and Matthew didn't make him keep going. They said after his fight with Rochelle, he seemed to calm down, and they argued less. In 2018, Zach got an internship with a man who owned a chauffeur company. He told his parents he was doing well and doing real business deals.
They were under the impression that he was making money, that he was, you know, he was actually doing deals. He told them about a real estate deal he'd done where he'd gotten a finder's fee for this luxury apartment that he found for a woman who worked at Chelsea Football Club. He increasingly seems as though... He's kind of impatient with school. He's not sure he wants to go to college.
He really is in a hurry. You know, he wants to go out and kind of get rich and be out there in the world.
Zach told his parents he was going to move out. He said he had met someone who owned multiple apartments in the Riverwalk Complex in central London, right next to the Thames. And he was letting Zach stay in one. But by October, Zach was back home... He said he was lonely. Rochelle and Matthew said that during this time, there was a lot about Zach's life they didn't know.
Rochelle knew that Zach had been visiting a neighbor, an older Russian woman. She sometimes wondered if they were dating. At one point, Zach showed his father his bank account. It showed he had over 800,000 pounds.
They were really worried about his lifestyle. You know, they were worried he might be dealing drugs or using drugs. They actually kind of surreptitiously got his doctor to do a blood test. I mean, he had a blood test at a checkup, but they asked the doctor to screen the blood for drugs, came back negative.
At one point they went away on vacation and they actually installed a hidden camera in the living room of the house just to see who he might have brought home. But all that came up was, you know, there were some guys from the local tennis club who came back and they would watch TV. They'd just watch movies on the television.
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Chapter 4: What was Zac's life like before he went missing?
And, you know, Zach had been living with them. They thought it would have been difficult for him to kind of carry on a heroin addiction and be living with them, and they would never pick up on any of the signs. This was a kid who got up in the morning and took long runs along the Thames. It just didn't seem right. Now, they did believe...
that Zach might have told Akbar that he was addicted to heroin. But they thought that if he said something like that, it was probably because he was scared or he wanted pity. You know, Zach was always the kid in school who would feign a migraine on the day of the exam.
He often would come up with stories that he would tell in order to kind of get out of doing something or get somebody to feel bad for him. So they believed that Zach might have lied and said this to Akbar, but they didn't believe the heroin story for a minute.
And what do they think about Akbar? I mean, he's more their peer than Zach's peer, I mean, you know, age-wise.
They recorded that first conversation. They actually recorded it on an iPhone. And eventually, they let me listen to the recording. And I think they were so reassured by Akbar. They were so grateful to him for his help. In that moment, they thought, this is a guy who actually kind of got burned by our son. He's like a real serious grown-up with a professional life and a lot of money, clearly.
And our son sort of wheedled his way into this guy's life, pretending to be something he wasn't. And Akbar has just learned that Zach was lying about all that. And yet he seems very kind, and he keeps saying, the most important thing is we've got to get Zach home. We've got to get him back safe.
Akbar Shamji introduced the Brettlers to Varinder Sharma over the phone. Varinder also thought Zach was a billionaire. Zach had told him that he wasn't speaking to his mother because of a problem with his inheritance. He had said his mother and the rest of his family were all in Dubai. Varinder said, I didn't think someone could lie to that extent.
Rochelle and Matthew apologized to both men for Zach's lies. Verinder said the only thing that mattered was getting Zach back. They all agreed to stay in touch. The next day, two police officers came to the Brettlers' home. They said a body had been found in the Thames. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Thanks to Squarespace for their support.
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Chapter 5: What kind of relationships did Zac have with his friends?
And they were confused by this. If you're leading a murder investigation and your lead suspect dies, why it is that if you were that cop, you would be kept sterile from knowing the circumstances of that death.
A year later, Detective Wilkinson asked to meet with Rochelle and Matthew. He had an update on the investigation. He told them that he wouldn't be able to give them a copy of the case files, but he would read everything aloud, and they could record it.
Rochelle and Matthew were told about text messages on Verinder Sharma's phone, that in the days leading up to his death, Akbar and Verinder no longer trusted Zach. Verinder Sharma had written to Akbar trying to find out how much money Zach had and texted that they should take Zach to an ATM. He also texted, I want 5% of that $205 million.
Akbar sent a voice memo back and said, I'm highly skeptical about this $205 million. Verinder responded saying that they were owed 50% of everything Zach owned. The night Zach died, Akbar had texted another man that he had been, quote, heating up the knives and clearing up blood. Matthew and Rochelle asked if the police had interviewed that man. They said no.
They also learned the police had not interviewed the chauffeur who knocked on the door and told Rochelle that she couldn't be Zach's mother. It had been two years since Zach died.
The cops really had very few answers and basically kept sort of suggesting, well, you know, maybe he just committed suicide. Maybe that's what this is. And at that point, the Brettlers were a little bit more aggressive because they had really done more homework than the police had.
And the lead detective kind of defensively says, you know, I feel like I'm the criminal here and you guys are interviewing me. You know, you're interrogating me.
In February of 2022, prosecutors in London said they would not file charges against Akbar Shamji in connection with Zach Brettler's death. Ten months later, about three years after Zach had died, the coroner's office held a public inquest about his death.
Anytime there's a death in the UK that is unnatural or kind of unclear, ambiguous, there's what's called an inquest. And it's an interesting procedure. It looks a little bit like a judicial inquiry. There's a coroner who acts essentially like a judge. You have evidence presented.
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